Monday, 1 February 2016

The Ribbon Trap by Shine Syamaladevi (Book Review: 2.75*/5) !!!

I am just done reading the 7th book of the year in the first month itself and I am quite happy with the speed I am about to complete my year's target of 60 books. I hope I achieve it without any further hurdles in this odyssey of reading. This time I picked up the debutante Shine Syamaladevi's The Ribbon Trap publishing by LiFi publication. The book is 271 pages thick but the disappointment is its price tag which is Rs. 295/-. In the country where even famous pulp authors like Chetan Bhagat and Durjoy Datta sell their book at Rs. 130, publication should think it 10 times before sticking such a price tag to a debutante work. It affects the author's career.

Well moving ahead, The Ribbon Trap begins with a sweet journey showing the two protagonists in a great relationship of love where the male is keeping care of the female as she is going through some problem related to depression and trauma. The sweetness gets interrupted when the author takes us in to the flashback because of which the girl, Smita, have reached this situation in a hospital where she in unable to remember her past properly. The flashback isn't any interesting until the 100th page or so when the real story begins on which the whole book has set its premises upon. The interest level continues until some 200th page or so and then the narration becomes very weak and the pre-climax isn't as interesting as a reader expects after reading some 100 pages of great page-turner value.

Shine has a fine command over the language which makes his narration pretty simple. The characterization of Smita is done wonderfully but I feel that he lacked when it came to giving importance to other character in the story. But I liked the author's effort in taking a risk of writing such a complex story in his first attempt itself rather than doubting his caliber. The twist that he suddenly brings in the flashback and the way he continued it by taking the story further from the present was interesting.

Coming to the drawbacks of this book I would say that because author isn't very great in the language, sometimes he is at loss of words in describing or narrating a scenario. Also there are many grammatical mistakes which are unavoidable. I can only advise the debutante author to read more books, understand how sentences are formed, generally the ones which are part of a conversation between characters. And read as many thriller books as possible because he has an inclination towards it. It would be great to read a thriller again from the author with better sentence formations, twists, turns and pre-climax where I found him a little lacking this time. I give this attempt 2.75* out of 5.